March

I grew up in North Dakota, where the month of March is still tightly gripped in Winter. And yet it's not the same as January or February; the days are getting longer and there's a certain quality on the wind. It's almost like a kiss. A soft, gentle, kiss from Spring even as Winter continues to rule over the northern plains.

I took the kiss on the wind as a promise, that something was about to change, and I began to love March.

So all through high school, which others around me continued as in the midst of winter, I had a secret friendship with the wind and the air and the sun in March. I would read favorite authors and re-read favorite books. I would take long walks in the growing evenings. I liked celebrating the little holidays of the First Day of Spring and St. Patrick's Day. March became my favorite month.

In college, I began to celebrate Lent, and as Ash Wednesday almost always falls in February, and Easter almost always in April, March was almost always caught completely in Lent. And I was caught up in legalistically denying myself. I also missed the so-slow, ever-so-slow turning over of winter to spring. The change was quicker, somehow, in Chicago, and tulips were sometimes already peaking the beginnings of their green leaves through by the end of March.

Now I've moved to Mexico, where there is no early spring and where March is completely buried under Lenten rituals in this Catholic country.

So I find that for the last few years, I miss early Spring. I miss the awakening joy. I miss home.